Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger Warns: Music's Big Pay Period Is Over

Agent M

Proud Member
Joined
Jul 17, 2009
Messages
901
Points
43
Location
M.I.B. Headquarters
Jagger Warns Music's Big Pay Period Is Over (Wednesday June 02, 2010 02:26 AM)

Rock veteran Mick Jagger has warned newcomers the days of huge pay packets in the music industry are over.

The Rolling Stones legend started his career at a time when record bosses had complete control over their acts, and refused to pay them for their album sales.

He admits times changed during the 1970s, '80s and '90s, and he received a fortune in royalties during the music industry's boom years.

But the star has told new acts not to expect to make millions from their released material, insisting: "That period has gone".

He says, "People only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When the Rolling Stones started out, we didn't make any money out of records because record companies wouldn't pay you. They didn't pay anyone.

"Then there was a small period between 1970 and 1997 where people did get paid and they got paid handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone."

http://uk.news.launch.yahoo.com/dyn...warns-music-s-big-pay-period.html&e=l_news_dm

The "small period between 1970 and 1997" almost perfectly coincides with Michael's career.
 
Touring is where the money is now :cheeky: I'm sure Mick knows this since the Rolling Stones seem to still tour quite a bit despite not having really released a studio album in ages.
 
Yes Michael made a lot of money during this period of time and put himself in a position where after the boom had finished, he was still getting paid for everyone else's work as well as having high royalty rates. The true King of Pop, Rock & Soul!
 
Touring is where the money is now :cheeky: I'm sure Mick knows this since the Rolling Stones seem to still tour quite a bit despite not having really released a studio album in ages.
Actually the Stones released an album with their last tour, but as with most releases by older acts, it got little promotion. Most singers/bands have always made their living by touring or concerts. Very few make any money by releasing records. There's literally thousands of albums released each year, and the majority of them sell little.
 
wow its must been difficult being a performers back in the 50's and 60's if their record companies didn't pay them for their album, look at frankie lymon the most he made was after his death

but, mick jagger's right even today the huge payments that music artists makes doesn't comes mainly from their album sales with piracy and everything but from endorsement deals, touring, and apperances in movies and tv shows
 
^^^^Back then, a lot of acts were off the street and not very educated, so were easy to take advantage of. They were happy to make a record. Some were paid in stuff like fur coats, cars, or booze & drugs instead of money. Also most of the labels were run by the mafia, so acts weren't willing to challenge the labels or they would get beat up or worse. In America, black acts usually had it worse because they couldn't perform in the same places the white acts could. Blacks just performed in juke joints or chitlin' circuit places that were usually run down.
 
Touring is where the money is now :cheeky: I'm sure Mick knows this since the Rolling Stones seem to still tour quite a bit despite not having really released a studio album in ages.

Yeah, that's it. The Stones are always on Tour it seems. Gotta give them credit for doing it at their age although I don't really find their performances interesting.
 
The public are more than happy to buy albums that are truly artistic and worthwhile.
 
^^^^^Whether or not somebody buys albums has nothing to do with getting paid. TLC, En Vogue, New Edition, & Toni Braxton sold millions of albums but were broke because they all had bad contracts. The record companies made lots of money off of them, but the acts themselves made very little or nothing from their record sales.
 
Thank god i'm in this for the music and not the money, lol!

Despite what Mick says, it seems easier to make a fortune to me. Susan Boyle just had a $6 million dollar payday for her first album!

Plus...even if music alone doesn't solely generate the income, music still provides the basis for all the other avenues available for artists to make big bucks.

Just look at the millions upon millions some made just in 2009 (links below might need to be cut/paste).
From rappers to pop to rock 'n roll...artists are still very much raking it in. There are probably now more than in Jaggers day making money and more of it.

http://www.aolradioblog.com/2009/07/20/richest-rappers-of-2009/

http://www.aolradioblog.com/2009/07/21/richest-musicians-of-2009/
 
Despite what Mick says, it seems easier to make a fortune to me. Susan Boyle just had a $6 million dollar payday for her first album!

Plus...even if music alone doesn't solely generate the income, music still provides the basis for all the other avenues available for artists to make big bucks.

Just look at the millions upon millions some made just in 2009 (links below might need to be cut/paste).
From rappers to pop to rock 'n roll...artists are still very much raking it in. There are probably now more than in Jaggers day making money and more of it.

http://www.aolradioblog.com/2009/07/20/richest-rappers-of-2009/

http://www.aolradioblog.com/2009/07/21/richest-musicians-of-2009/

You are correct, and I only take about half of what Mick said to be brutally true. It's def. not as easy to make money in music like it used to be....per say. Not saying it wasn't tough in the golden years, cause it was.

But it's not as easy as making an album, releasing a single, and touring for a year to make good money. More than likely you're gonna be in debt the first time around. I think someone said earlier that straight-up touring is where the money lies....that is true too. That's how ALL jam bands make their money. They're also basically cutting out the middle man by doing almost everything production/promotion-wise themselves, and pocketing the cash.

But I also think there's more an artist has to do these days to make the cash they so desire. I think how much one is willing to "sell" themselves also should be taken into account. We have a lot of media whores who are technically successful artists in the biz.

And those artists you showed....damn they can sure make a pretty penny! But that's not even 1/2 of a percent in all the other artists who are doing the same exact thing and not getting as much. But I guess, that's why they call it popular music.
 
^^^^^Whether or not somebody buys albums has nothing to do with getting paid. TLC, En Vogue, New Edition, & Toni Braxton sold millions of albums but were broke because they all had bad contracts. The record companies made lots of money off of them, but the acts themselves made very little or nothing from their record sales.

Did they all write their own songs and/or produce?

Because if you only sing, you will get next to nothing per album. It only increases if you write and produce your own material.
 
Did they all write their own songs and/or produce?

Because if you only sing, you will get next to nothing per album. It only increases if you write and produce your own material.
Some of them do, but still, that shouldn't matter. The performer is who sells. Prince said he makes more money being independent than he did with Warners, and he doesn't have to sell millions of albums before making a profit or worry about having hits. Even if you write songs, it depends on if you own the publishing as to what you'll earn or the percentage between the songwriter and publishing company. Paul McCartney gets royalties from Beatles tunes, but he'd make more if he owns the publishing. Also if a record doesn't sell, it doesn't really matter if the act writes songs or not. There's many other factors as how much an act earns. Like if Susan Boyle lives in England, most of that $6 million will go to the taxman. That's why a lot of acts from there move somewhere else to become tax exiles.
 
writing all your stuff doesn't matter prince made 13 cents per copy for Purple rain doing the so called Boom period Mick Jagger talks about.

Jagger got in bed with the industry long ago because him and the stones got jacked back when. there stuff from 64-71 they couldn't touch because they don't own it. you can bet your bottom dollar once he understood publishing, touring and Merchendising(think about the Rolling stones Logo) they made sure to take care of business on stage and Off.

Michael Jackson got paid 2 dollars and 10 cents per copy sold off of Thriller and he still got peanuts compared to what Sony made off of that money.

Artists ain't never made no money from albums unless they sold a whole lot of records and broke even with the budget spent,etc.. the Music business though is designed to always keep you in debt no matter if you break even or not. touring and off spring merchendising is where artists makes there money and even then acts gotta be sharp to the gate keepers trying to pull a fast one over on them.

yes Black artists back in the 50's were hustled out of there royalitys in exchange for Perms and Cadallacs.

Jagger doesn't know because a Kid like Justin Bieber has the same dreams that Mick Jagger had.

what Jagger ain't saying is how the industry poor mouth's and sits on people's royalitys and that the Lawyers get all the money,etc... they keep the artists desperate for them.
 
Jagger got in bed with the industry long ago because him and the stones got jacked back when. there stuff from 64-71 they couldn't touch because they don't own it. you can bet your bottom dollar once he understood publishing, touring and Merchendising(think about the Rolling stones Logo) they made sure to take care of business on stage and Off.
Now with deals like the one Madonna made with Live Nation, the label even gets a cut of touring income and merchandising profits. To change that old Buggles song a little, "Internet killed the record star". People downloading songs for free is the main reason the record labels are going under, so they're trying to get the acts another way.
 
Sales are plummeting, and the music industry is returning to the era of track-led consumption. Is the LP doomed?

By Tim Ingham November 9, 2018 Rolling Stone
drake-the-album-is-in-deep-trouble-2.jpg

Drake performs on stage at Tacoma Dome on November 1, 2018 in Tacoma, Washington.

Make no mistake
, the album is fighting for its life.

Sales of music’s most beloved format are in free fall in the United States this year. According to figures published by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), the value of total stateside album sales in the first half of 2018 (across download, CD and vinyl) plummeted by 25.8 percent when compared with the first half of 2017.

If that percentage decline holds for the full year, and there’s every indication it will, annual U.S. album sales in 2018 will end up at half the size of what they were as recently as 2015. To put it more plainly, U.S. consumers will spend around half a billion dollars less on albums this year than they did in 2017.

The CD album is, predictably, bearing the brunt of this damage. After a comfortable 6.5 percent drop in sales in 2017, in the first half of 2018, revenues generated by the CD album in the USA were slashed nearly in half – down 41.5 percent, to $246 million.
The-Album-Is-in-Deep-Trouble-and-the-Music-Business-Probably-Can%E2%80%99t-Save-it-CHART-EDIT.jpg



It’s not hard to see why. 2018 will go down as a landmark year for the acceleration of the decline in physical album sales: The likes of Drake, Eminem, Cardi B, Travis Scott, Migos and Kanye West have all released hotly anticipated new LPs exclusively on digital services in their first week. All brought physical formats into play only after their records’ initial “sales” rush was over.
Hip-hop’s biggest names, it seems, are actively turning their back on the CD (and on brick-and-mortar retailers) — instead focusing on the likes of Spotify and Apple Music, where their genre is currently the king of kings.

None of this, of course, is a big shock.

Back in 2014, you may remember, Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek had an awkward public sparring match with Taylor Swift, following the superstar’s decision to pull her back catalog from his service. Facing down accusations that Spotify was “cannibalizing” the album, Ek wrote, “In the old days, multiple artists sold multiple millions [of albums] every year. That just doesn’t happen anymore; people’s listening habits have changed — and they’re not going to change back.”

He wasn’t wrong. As we all know, the music business held hands with Ek and dived profit-first into a streaming-led industry.
Now, however, a murmur is quietly breaking out: In the rush to follow the money, did the music business sacrifice something more valuable than it could have realized?

Sure, hits on streaming services make a lot of people a lot of money. But as the death knell rings for the album — and the music industry returns to the pre-Beatles era of track-led consumption — are fans being encouraged to develop a less-committed relationship with new artists?

The answer to that question ultimately depends on how those fans are consuming music on Spotify, Apple Music, et. al. One thing’s for sure: Not all new music is created equal — and the stats bear it out.

Take Drake’s Scorpion, the biggest album in the U.S. market this year. In a clear bid to rack up as many streams possible (and break multiple records in the process), Scorpion is 25 tracks long. Yet, according to numbers I’ve obtained and crunched from Spotify-monitoring site Kworb, some 63 percent of global streams from Scorpion on Spotify since the album’s release in June have come from just three songs: “God’s Plan,” “In My Feelings” and “Nice for What.”

In fact, just six songs on the album (also including “Nonstop,” “Don’t Matter to Me” and “I’m Upset”) have claimed 82 percent of its total streams. The other 19 tracks get just 18 percent of the spoils between them — an average of less than 1 percent each.

It’s a similar story with the biggest album of the first half of the year in the U.S.: Post Malone’s beerbongs & bentleys, from which just three tracks (“Rockstar,” “Psycho” and “Better Now”) account for 62 percent of worldwide Spotify streams.
Image-1-1.jpg



You could argue that things have always been this way — that fans in previous eras would buy albums and then simply rinse and repeat their favorite individual tracks, ignoring what they deemed to be duds.

Additionally, you could argue that streaming has been wonderful news for the album — any fan anywhere in the world can now legally consume albums for “free” via Spotify, rather than shelling out a potentially prohibitive expense on CDs or downloads. If the experience of listening to full albums was compelling enough in 2018, therefore, the format should be thriving.

Yet industry machinery has certainly propagated this dismantling of the LP. The Billboard 200, still the most recognized album chart in the world, has, since December 2014, bundled together streams of individual tracks from an LP as “streaming-equivalent albums.” Billboard’s current, much-debated formula: 1,250 paid-for streams from the likes of Apple Music or Spotify Premium count as one album “sale”, as do 3,750 streams from ad-funded services like YouTube or Spotify’s free tier.

This has led to some pretty odd situations: Drake’s Scorpion, for instance, sold 160,000 true album units (via download sites) in its opening week, but, according to Billboard/Nielsen, more than three times this amount (551,000) came via “streaming-equivalent albums.”

In Scorpion’s second week on the Billboard 200, the potential silliness of “streaming-equivalent albums” came home to roost: The album sold (as in actually sold) just 29,000 copies on iTunes, etc., yet nearly 10 times this “sales” volume (288,000) was cobbled together from single-track streams.

The music industry is facing a bit of an existential crisis, then: How can something (streaming) be considered the “equivalent” of something else (an album sale) when, by your own measure, the former now completely dominates the latter?

In 2018, “streaming-equivalent albums” seems like daft phrasing. It is e-mail-equivalent faxes. It is car-equivalent steeds. It is Netflix-equivalent Betamax.

The death of the album track, if not the album itself, is having a significant commercial impact.

Lucas Keller is the founder of Milk & Honey in Los Angeles, a management firm that looks after some of the hottest behind-the-scenes pop songwriters and producers in the modern marketplace. He told Music Business Worldwide this week that the days of his clients making any real money from non-hit album tracks are now “pretty much over.” Keller commented, “I sit at a dashboard . . . showing the publishing revenue across the board on all of my clients, and I have a really good idea what Track 9 isn’t worth.”

The music industry is waking up to this fact, and it’s keen to to arrest the devastation. On Saturday, October 13th, the U.K. music business clubbed together to launch a nationwide campaign: National Album Day.

This was a big deal. The major labels (via the BPI), the independent labels (via AIM), the Official Charts Company and a vast network of U.K. music retailers joined forces to push their crusade to the public. It got wall-to-wall coverage on the radio channels of the BBC — another key partner.

The idea was to ape some of the magic of Record Store Day, the annual initiative that sees a yearly surge in physical music-buying on both sides of the Atlantic. Can you guess what happened?

Despite everyone’s best efforts, U.K. album sales fell slightly in the week of National Album Day.

As predicted by Daniel Ek four years ago, the public is obviously growing increasingly comfortable with its playlist-driven, track-led music-consumption habits. The music industry, however, is starting to question whether it’s quite so sure.

Tim Ingham is the founder and publisher of Music Business Worldwide, which has serviced the global industry with news, analysis and jobs since 2015. He writes a weekly column for “Rolling Stone.”
 
by Elias Leight | February 12, 2020 | Rolling Stone
Viinyl.jpg

Last April, all three major labels started to use the same distributor for CDs and records. The consolidation has resulted in 'lost stock, unfilled orders, [and] massive delays in fulfillment.'

Last fall, Steve Harkins was conducting a routine check on a shipment of records and CDs at Ingram Entertainment, a wholesale music distributor headquartered in Tennessee. Instead of vinyl, though, Harkins was amused to find that Ingram’s supplier had sent a pallet packed with bottles of windshield-wiper fluid. “I called customer service, they apologized profusely,” he recalls. “I said, ‘The thing that really bothers me is that you didn’t have the courtesy to throw in some car wax.’ ”

No harm done — until a few weeks later, when Harkins received another surprise that suggested a troubling trend. This time, a shipment that was supposed to contain music came filled with bottles of prescription cough syrup. Other orders of records and CDs arrived damaged or incorrectly packed. “You can’t make this stuff up,” Harkins says. “In all my years of business, I’ve never been able to report that we’ve been missing significant quantities of product, and in its place, prescription cough syrup and carwash fluid.”

Harkins isn’t alone. In January, a record store owner in Poughkeepsie, New York, got a similar shock. An unscheduled delivery truck pulled into the parking lot of Darkside Records. “The driver says, ‘I got a weird one for you,’ ” remembers Justin Johnson, who owns the store. Johnson went outside to find that an entire freight truck was being used to haul just four records — copies of a 50th-anniversary reissue of the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed, arriving two and a half months after their street date.

Another record store owner, Terry Currier of Music Millennium in Portland, Oregon, placed an order last year with Universal Music Group: approximately 700 items to ship on October 1st, giving them plenty of time to make it to the store before holiday shopping began. None of the albums showed up until after the Christmas rush.

Episodes like these — nonsensical, maddening, and business-threatening — have become commonplace for CD and record retailers over the past 10 months. Most agree that the inciting incident took place last April, when Warner Records moved its physical distribution to Direct Shot Distributing, a company that was already being used by the other two major labels, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. A single company was suddenly responsible for sorting and shipping the vast majority of CDs and records sold in the U.S. market. Unfortunately, it seems that Direct Shot was incapable of taking on the additional work, according to interviews with more than 20 managers, retailers, and label executives. “The whole system collapsed,” says David Azzoni, a 15-year veteran of physical retail, illustrating the frailty of a distribution network that had long been taken for granted.

As a result, many labels, including the majors, are now struggling with what was once the most basic task in the music industry: getting their albums into stores for listeners who want to buy them. Affected titles include catalog classics as well as new releases (store owners interviewed for this story mentioned problems stocking 2019 albums from the Black Keys, Beck, and Cigarettes After Sex). With Record Store Day approaching in April, retailers are scared that they’ll be short of merchandise on the biggest day of the year for physical sales, while independent labels and artists, who are often more dependent on physical sales than the majors, are trying to cope with lost revenue and, in some cases, changing their rollout plans.

“It has affected us and almost everyone we know,” says an executive at an indie label that relies on Direct Shot. “Lost stock, unfilled orders, massive delays in fulfillment — it’s amazing how a company most have never heard of can bring the U.S. music industry to its knees.”

For many casual listeners, the convenience and rapid growth of streaming services has turned the physical side of the music business into an afterthought. But despite declining physical sales overall, CDs and vinyl still generated revenues of nearly a billion dollars in this country in 2019, according to Richard Burgess, CEO of the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM).
record2.jpg

A whole freight truck was used to ship just four records, according to one record store owner in Poughkeepsie, New York.

That amounts to roughly one-tenth of the overall music industry in the U.S. — “not peanuts,” as Burgess puts it. And at many independent labels, the physical music business is worth far more: Vinyl and CD sales account for as much as 50 percent of revenue for some members of A2IM. Vinyl in particular has been growing steadily for years now, to the benefit of both major labels — who released many of the most popular records in 2019, according to the analytics company Alpha Data — and indies: “Physical releases are often a key part of their marketing plan,” Burgess says.

Thanks to decades of consolidation in the music business, once Warner moved to Direct Shot, the company became single-handedly responsible for more than 80 percent of the physical music on the market. That chunk includes releases put out by the three major labels — all declined to comment — along with those put out by the many independent labels that have been scooped up by major-label distribution networks over time.

“Direct Shot is obviously not prepared to handle the volume they took on,” says Andrea Paschal, executive director of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores. “It’s a one-inch pipe with 10 inches of water going through it,” adds Allen Kovac, CEO and founder of the independent label Better Noise Music, which left the Warner-owned Alternative Distribution Alliance (ADA) a couple of years ago.

Direct Shot did not respond to requests for comment. But Kyle Krug, director of marketing and communications for Legacy Supply Chain Services, a warehousing and logistics company that finalized its purchase of Direct Shot last summer, insists that the company has “brought lots of resources to bear” in an effort to retool Direct Shot’s distribution system.

Krug says Legacy Supply Chain Services’ efforts, which have already cost the company millions of dollars, encompass everything from “making sure a high-volume product is positioned in a spot where it’s easier to pick” to bringing in “high-end supply-chain consultants” to installing a new “tier-one [warehouse] management system.” Was the Direct Shot warehouse unprepared to meet the demands of the modern music landscape? “That’s a fair statement,” Krug says.

But with Direct Shot still struggling to fulfill its mandate, many in retail doubt the efficacy of Legacy’s “re-engineering.” Michael Kurtz, the co-founder of Record Store Day, believes that “any distribution company that was serious would have the problem fixed in 30 days — 60 days max, and that’s a huge stretch.”

“They’re not fixing it,” Kurtz adds, “and it’s not gonna be fixed.”

Unfortunately for the majors, since they all chose to rely on third-party distribution, they don’t have a lot of options at the moment. There are “not a whole lot of Direct Shots out there,” as Krug puts it. “They’re in kind of a niche business.”

Retailers say Universal temporarily moved some distribution to a separate facility to reduce the Direct Shot logjam. More recently, the three major labels stopped shipping music to small stores as a way of lightening Direct Shot’s load, according to retailers. (Some stores have succeeded in ordering directly from Sony in the past few weeks.) Stores were asked to rely instead on one-stops, basically middleman distributors, but that led to price increases. The major labels attempted “to keep it as cost-neutral as possible,” according to two retailers, by having the one-stops offer discounts to stores that used to order directly from the majors.

Some in retail have seen an improvement in fulfillment rates and delivery times — though it’s not close to back to normal — while others have seen no change. “I’ve been fond of saying, ‘Putting a Band-Aid on an amputation doesn’t really cut it,’ ” jokes John Kunz of Waterloo Records in Austin.

Kurtz conducted an informal survey of record store owners in his orbit. “The first four months of 2019, most record stores were up 20 percent over the year before, business-wise,” he says. “Between that time and the end of the year, we went to flat to negative-four percent on the year.” Paschal is sure that “this situation will be the end for some stores.”

Aside from the retailers, the greatest pain is being felt by indie labels and middle-class artists who don’t have massive stream counts. “For working musicians, physical [sales], selling records on the road, getting those records into stores, that’s still a big piece of their economy,” says Tom Grover Biery, who spent 20 years at Warner and became a prominent early advocate of Record Store Day during his time there.

An executive at an indie that goes through ADA says the chaos at Direct Shot has “cost us severe loss of business for almost nine months.” “We started to reschedule releases in the hopes that they would benefit if the situation got better,” he adds. Andy Farrow, who manages the metal band Opeth, says the delays in physical shipping also “impacted our chart position.”

A few indie labels, like XL and 4AD, have managed to extricate themselves from their distribution deals with major-label-owned companies, working instead with the independently owned Redeye Distribution. (A rep for the Beggars Group, which includes both of those labels, declined to comment.) The indie-label executive who is currently struggling with fallout from Direct Shot distribution says, “We’re looking for alternatives.” Krug of Legacy Supply Chain Services calls this “a concerning trend."
Records1.jpg

A pallet was delivered to Music Millenium in Portland, Oregon, with one box and one CD in it.

Many indie labels that have been affected by the distribution crisis are scared to speak about their experiences. “People are afraid of talking about what really happened because there are people that will hold that against them,” says the executive at an indie label that goes through ADA. “Before indies try to get out of a deal, they’re worried about not getting out if there’s any negative publicity surrounding them,” Burgess explains. “When they get out, they wind up having to sign an N.D.A.” So the situation continues quietly.

As the indie community’s concerns have gone unaddressed month after month, wounds have started to fester, and a conspiracy theory that the major labels are actively trying to eliminate the physical business has gained momentum. “We know the demand is here,” says Johnson, the Poughkeepsie store owner, “but are they gonna kill off the business?”

Krug has heard this theory, and he calls it “an unfortunate assumption.” “We absolutely recognize the pain that those folks are having,” he continues. “We’re all investing in this business to ensure that the physical music industry maintains itself.” As to when Direct Shot will be running smoothly again, he says “we’re trying not to float specific dates out there,” though “we’ve got a lot of big [changes] that are coming to the end point.”

Mike Fratt, general manager of Homer’s Music in Omaha, Nebraska, is also aware of the theory that the majors are trying to wash their hands of CDs and vinyl by choking off the supply. But he offers a different explanation. “I don’t think anybody malevolently tried to hurt us,” he says. “It was greed, poor management decisions, and incompetence that brought this about.”
 
by Emily Blake | March 23, 2020 | Rolling Stone

As the spread of COVID-19 isolates more and more Americans in their homes, many thought that they would be coping by streaming more music — and, in turn, helping to soften the inevitably catastrophic blow that the pandemic will have on the music industry.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case so far.

According to numbers from Alpha Data, the data analytics provider that powers the Rolling Stone Charts, streams in the United States actually fell last week, failing to offset a far more grim downturn in album sales.

During the week of March 13th through March 19th — the week restaurants and bars across the nation closed and more Americans self-quarantined — streams dropped 7.6 percent, to under 20.1 billion. Programmed streams on services like Pandora dropped 9 percent to just under 3.5 billion, while on-demand streams (audio and video) dropped 7.3 percent to 16.6 billion. Dropoffs off this magnitude are rare, with the exception being the week after Christmas, as listening starts to return to normalcy after a busy streaming week.

Digital song sales didn’t fare much better, dipping 10.7 percent to 3.9 million — the first time they’ve dropped below 4 million in the four years since Alpha Data started tracking these sales.

These drops coincided with a far bleaker — yet more anticipated — drop in album sales. Physical sales plummeted 27.6 percent last week, while digital album sales dropped 12.4 percent. And it’s bound to get worse in the next few weeks, as Amazon announced mid-last week that it was halting new shipments from U.S. music providers until April 5th to prioritize in-demand essentials like household products and medical supplies.

For those who did turn to streaming last week, numbers from Alpha Data show a shift in the kind of music they gravitated toward. New songs — those released within the past eight weeks — dropped 14.5 percent, which is about twice the drop-off for catalog songs, released 18 months ago or earlier. Similarly, the most popular music saw a decrease notably higher than music overall, with the top 500 songs pulling in 12.9 percent fewer streams last week than the top 500 songs the week prior.

Listeners were less likely to stream pop, rap, R&B and Latin music, as those genres saw dropoffs higher than the overall trend. But three genres actually saw an increase in streams: Classical (up 1.5 percent), folk (+2.9 percent) and children’s music (+3.8 percent).

With the live music industry at a standstill for the foreseeable future, artists will inevitably rely more and more on streaming to get by. An online petition started by musician Evan Greer urged Spotify to triple its royalty rates to artists, saying, “This is a moment when Big Tech companies need to do their part to help.”
 
Here's a recent interview with artist manager Blue Williams. There's some profanity, so probably not safe for work. There's some discussion on how today's artists are different from the ones from the past & also how the industry in general is different.
 
Back
Top